A Family Compound in Coastal Maine, Made From Scratch

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Anthony Esteves’s family compound in coastal Maine.CreditGreta Rybus

By Hannah Goldfield

Sept. 19, 2017

The only thing more impressive than the fact that Anthony Esteves, who is 31, built a house from scratch and painstakingly restored another on his family compound on coastal Maine is the fact that he’d never done it before. This is not to say he hadn’t had any training, but it was not the kind you might assume: At RISD, he studied not architecture but sculpture, “which I think now comes through in my work more so than ever,” he says. “I got out of school and figured out over a couple years that the building process was really like my studio practice.”

Other than that, he was armed with only a deep and abiding appreciation for the architecture of both New England and Japan (having grown up in the former and spent time in the latter) and a passion for research.

When the property was purchased, it had just one structure, a 1754 Cape Cod that had been dismantled and rebuilt; he restored it not according to strict historical preservation standards — “I feel like it’s so constricting, and people do things just for the yield,” he says — but, rather, to his “vision of what a historic building should be.”

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The living room in the 1754 Cape Cod that Anthony Esteves restored, where his mother now lives.CreditGreta Rybus

He was interested, he explains, in “getting it to a place where it’s informed by the entirety of New England architecture, things that I find interesting, so that it’s completely about the New England aesthetic but it isn’t tied to the historic preservation of this building exactly.” This meant not only poring through books and historical records but also learning from older local-builder friends, including one nonagenarian, who passed down information and techniques that had been passed down to them.

The finished Cape is now occupied by his mother, who moved up from Rhode Island, where Esteves was raised. Mere feet away, Esteves lives with his partner, Julie O’Rourke, a native of Maine who is also an artist and a RISD graduate, and their young son, Diogo, in a house entirely of his own design.

This one uses New England as a jumping-off point but also incorporates some of his favorite Japanese techniques: traditional colonial clapboard siding, for example, which is a dying art in Maine — “the vinyl salesman is pretty big up here,” Esteves says with a laugh — is painted black, using a Japanese-style, fermented soot-based paint that he makes himself.

And though the dimensions of the “soot house,” as the family has affectionately named it, “are in relation to very common New England homes,” from the pitch of the roof to the volume of the rooms, part of it is built with what Esteves calls “burn boards,” slats of cedar that have been charred in the style of a Japanese practice called shou sugi ban. Inspired, also, by the Japanese penchant for efficiency, he carefully figured out how to heat the entire house with a single, tiny stove that burns just half a cord of wood each winter.

If it takes a village to raise a child, Esteves is upping the ante by essentially building his own village. Currently under construction, just behind the Cape, is a classic New England barn — to be finished in soot-paint, of course — which will serve as the family library, home to their collection of over 7,000 books.